Tell PayPal to stop discrimination

Online payment giant PayPal is refusing to allow West Bank Palestinians to use its service – even though it does serve the illegal settler-colonisers in their midst.

A campaign and petition are urging PayPal to end its flagrant discrimination against Palestinians. You can sign the petition here.

The campaigning group SumOfUs writes:

PayPal does business in 203 countries around the world and is the default method of online payment for millions. But it won’t serve Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank — even though it has no problem providing Israelis living in illegal settlements with the same service.

This shocking discrimination is crippling Palestine’s burgeoning tech sector — and without PayPal, Palestinian tech companies are at a distinct disadvantage.

But people are starting to take notice. 40 MPs have just signed a motion demanding the global payments service stop singling out Palestinians. And with international pressure mounting, we can finally get PayPal to stop its baseless discrimination once and for all.

PayPal’s failure to operate in Palestine is having serious repercussions for businesses, particularly on the Palestinian tech sector. The tech sector is one of the few industries that actually has the potential to grow under Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And there’s no substitute for what’s become a global standard for making online payments globally.

140,000 of us demanded that Airbnb stop profiting off of vacation rentals listed in the illegally occupied West Bank. We delivered your message to Airbnb biggest investor, Fidelity Investments, in 17 different cities around the world, as well as Airbnb’s international and European headquarters. We even built a mock site where thousands of our supporters gave Airbnb one-star reviews for its listing on stolen Palestinian land that got us press hits all around the world.

PayPal has done the right thing in the past — and together we can make it do the right thing again. In North Carolina, PayPal courageously scrapped a major operations center in protest of an unjust law that took away protections for the LGBTQ+ community.

If we come together now, we can show Paypal that it can expand its market, help the 2,000 IT grads Palestine produces every year find work, and finally end the growing backlash among British politicians, tech companies and concerned PayPal users like us.